Francis Bacon Lecture 2017: Poverty and Inequality

In this lecture Professor Jonathan Wolff explored how we can improve our understandings of poverty and inequality by taking insights from both social policy and political philosophy, looking especially at the role of social goods and status goods.

Recent theories of equality in political philosophy have tended to divide between those theories that concentrate on the distribution of resources between individuals, and those that focus on the nature of the relationships between them (distributional and relational theories of equality). Poverty is most obviously a distributional matter, understood as lack of resources. However, contemporary theories of poverty often define poverty in relational terms, understanding poverty as lacking the resources needed to fit in with your society. In this talk I will explore how we can improve our understandings of poverty and inequality by taking insights from both social policy and political philosophy, looking especially at the role of social goods and status goods.